Billy's parents, Diane and Patrick Moss, died when he was 8 years in a single car accident in 1992 in Phoenix, Arizona, when they had a tire blow out at high speed -- Billy was in the car with them but survived the crash. His maternal aunt, Anna Lacey, became his guardian and they moved to Wandin Valley because she thought it would be a better environment in which to raise him.

Tom Newman, the local cop, took an interest in him from the beginning and played cricket and other games with him. Billy began to look at Tom as a father figure and when Tom and Anna got married in December 1992, they truly became a family. His paternal grandparents tried to obtain custody of him in 1993 when Anna and Tom began looking into officially adopting him but it didn't work.

He liked baseball and cricket and playing computer games. He adopted a golden lab puppy that Darcy had found and named him George Gershwin after one of Anna's favorite musical artists.